GEORGINA II

The last relationship she has been to smote her heart the most. It hurt like a bird caught between the collision of two lorries. It was the relationship that made her realize, regretfully, the pain she was causing people around her. All her boyfriends left for the same reason. She wasn’t bothered much about why the first four left. Maybe you would, but she didn’t.

(Read the previous episode here.)

****

She woke up and leaned forward quickly like a mummy that had been summoned by the living. She was breathing quite heavily as if she had been in a running battle while asleep. Maybe the ghosts of her life had caught up with her in a dream and the experience was close to real. Her heart was beating fast like that of a piglet amidst a pack of jackals. She looked around, and for a minute, she couldn’t tell where she was. She felt like everything she feared had been surrounding her, while she slept just like devotees of a cult would stand around an altar during a ritual.

He must have heard the anguish in her breath and came rushing to the living room with worry dressed all over his face.

“Georgina are you okay?” He sat next to her and held her shoulder as if to comfort her. She shook her head and looked at him in utter confusion. As if to ask, who are you?

“Can I get you some water? Gosh you’re heating up.” He said after he felt her forhead with the back of his hand.

“Phil?” She called out as if to finally remember his name.

He turned and looked at her in the middle of his way out of the room. “Yes?”

She paused for nearly too long until he resolved to continue with the journey to get some water and a wet cloth.

Not long after, she had calmed down and composed. She had been reminded of how she got there. The meds she had taken before she slept must have beeen one hell of a dose. She experienced uncontrollable long gazes from time to time as she sat there, opposite Phil, who was overly concerned about what was happening to her and what she had been through. He is a therapist. He must have seen worse reactions from his patients. But it doesn’t mean he would get used to them. He would just know what to do when he is around his patients when they behave in a certain way; like reading from a book.

She would often switch from long gazes to writhing on the couch while crying like a lost child. Throughout her life, she had fought to show nothing but a strong personality that cannot be run down by anybody’s words of actions. A heart of iron that knows no corrosion nor breakage. But this particular day found her defence systems wallowing on the ground with soil in mouth. She had reached her breaking point.

Nearly a dozen cups of green tea and three showers later, she finally began to let the dogs of distress out. She had reached a point in her life where she couldn’t take it anymore and vowed to herself that she’d talk to someone. The condition that had lived in her bones and stemming from her mind since God was a boy was now locking horns with the peace of her life and the people she loved dearly.

She was hurting because the people she cared for the most were ejecting themselves from her life like pilots of a jet that is about to crush. Her support systems that she now realises she hadn’t been grateful and kind to, were leaving through the drain beneath her feet. What hurt her even more was the fact that she didn’t know what to do about it. She had made every wrong move in the hangman game and now, seated before her therapist friend, she was figuratively hanging on a rope by her neck. Phil was nearly shitting his pants while trying to hold her feet together in order to place a stool beneath her feet for her to stand on. Just maybe, if he’d get the suffocation and choking to stop, she’d live again.

****

“I love someone so much, and you know him already. He is the only man in my life that I have ever madly loved, Phil. And he is the same man I have hurt the most. It hurts me to know that.”

Like any average millennial her age, she wasn’t left out in the love game. Or at least, what this generation refers to as love these days. But unlike majority of her peers around the world, she is broken, yes, but quite responsible for her own heartbreak – so to say; her version of heartbreak is different.

I digress. I call this generation of ours, ‘The Broken Generation.’ Nearly everyone, if not all of us, is a walking broken piece, just patched up shoddily by duct-tape. All these is because someone somewhere broke our hearts. You see, there is a difference between a break up and a heartbreak. A mere break-up is like a an impact that caused a crack on the wall and all you had to do was cement the broken part. But a heartbreak? That’s a whole broken wall spread across the ground. And not many of us have managed to fully rebuild our broken walls. But when we do, we end up building them too high, fortressing our hearts from the same terrible event they once experienced. That is what I call a defense mechanism. We all end up having one. You think you don’t?

Ask yourself why it’s so hard for you to love someone again pretty much in the same way you did with that mjango who broke your heart immensely. Ask yourself why your view on love and relationships has changed ever since then. You loathe nearly everything about it. Ask yourself why you cannot help but compare every new potential person that comes your way to that ex of yours that you loved to the moon and back. You’re afraid to love again but at the same time, your emotional system has guarded up so strongly that you just can’t love again like you once did. The Broken Generation mjango.

Georgina is that bird that flew itself head on to the window pane of a skyscraper. Now she is falling half-concsiously. The first boyfriend in this evaluation list was actually her second boyfriend at the time. They started seeing each other when she was 16 in 2014 up until 2015 when she joined University. The mjango she was seeing was married. Grown ass man but he nearly bowed whenever she spoke also because he loved her to death. He did literally everything as she said or even commanded. This man worshipped the ground she walked on. There is a strength of a woman and there is force of a woman. Dare not to think they are the same thing.
Their apartments faced each other. You know it’s one thing to be hen-pecked as a man and it’s another thing to be hen-pecked by your girlfriend who lives a spit-stride away from you. ‘Without you I just can’t breathe,’ you’d say to your girl. But ‘With you I just cannot breathe’ is what he’d tell her.

He drove her everywhere she wanted. Dropped her off to school and picked her in the evening. During party days, that was actually every weekend, he drove her and her friends out and sat at a separate table because he didn’t drink. (Clean freak is what came to mind when she told me that.) He is the Delmonte gang I bet. The guy even switched churches to the church she used to attend. (I hope he has a good defense for that when he gets to the pearl gates of heaven.) Every holiday he went with his family, he tagged her along. He was the perfect candidate for her narcissistic supply and that was why she loved him. If he was able to tiptoe over situations, he would do so not to break any glass that would offend her. He dreaded it like a plague. She could print out the fear in his eyes whenever he offended her.

What seemed to almost be a trend about her relationships is that she would fight with her boyfriends. The first time she fought with, let’s call him Mr. Grown Man, was when one of Georgina’s girl friends texted him asking for money for her birthday. Guess what mjango? He went ahead and told her, like a good boy who had found a pistol in the play ground and took it home to mama, before any other child could find it, and maybe, naivel, blow each other’s intestines off in the old outdoor kids’ game dubbed, ‘Police & Robber.’ Normally, in my opinion, a girl would melt over that level of transparency from her man. But not this girl. She hit him with words asking things like, “Why is she comfortable texting you?”

The second time, which was this close to the vietnam war, was when another friend of hers asked to meet Mr. Grown Man. As you’d expect, he also told her about it and she said she would go with him but sit elsewhere to see what the summoner’s intentions were. She later realised that he had gone without her. The sleeping animal in her awoke and followed him to the restaurant they had planned to meet. She found them there. (Nigga wasn’t smart right? Mtu huchange venue buda!)
If you have never seen a lady cause a scene, then thank you for tuning in. She pounced on them like a hungry and angry lion roaring blasphemous words. Image and reputation can go to hell, she must have said that to herself as she pummeled her boyfriend, a whole Mr. Grown Ass Man – in public. The summoner in this case escaped the wrath of a fellow girl by a whisker and managed to hide. Her man on the other hand, managed to run as well but not without a ripped shirt and vest, nail scratches and bites on his arm and finally, blows on his face.

As if it was not enough. He followed him to his digs. The same digs he left him staying at because she had shifted houses by then. (Again, buda! Ukikimbia usiende kejani! Who mistaught these men yawa!) When she got to the gate, he could tell it was her and so he came out to avoid drama. And by drama, I bet that means he didn’t want ‘watu wa ploti’ to see his grown ass being adroitly beaten up by a first year girl.

He asked her to get into the car. Definitely she’d shotgun. Maybe the ministry of transport should have considered to advise people not to argue and drive as well. Maybe drinking and driving is not the only cause of road accidents. They kept hurling words at each other like children aggressively throwing mad balls at each other. She has a temper that rises fast and makes her behave irrationally. Irrational is something like grabbing his spectacles, breaking them into two and throwing them out the window. As a result they drove into a ditch. The car french kissed the bushes and cooled its engine within the loins of nature. I bet without his spects, the ditch looked like a superhighway.

****

She was seated upright holding a black mug with both hands close to her chest. She had a black hoodie on, graphically printed the writings 2XX and XXX just below it. Covering her lower body was a green and black masai shuka. She was glaring at the ceiling. She then slowly lowered her head as if to snap back from a trance.

Phil’s eyes met with hers.
“Go on. You’re doing well.” He said while smiling slightly.

That’s when it hit her that she had gone on a talking spree without knowing. Like she was hypnotized and now she was willingly throwing up everything she had stocked in her gut for years.

“Does it always feel this good to talk to someone?”

“Only if you’re sure they want to listen to you talk about your next boyfriend , who, I have reason to believe, you also dragged his face on a tarmac road.”
She chuckled.

And the series continues when it does mjango…